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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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18. Robert Jungk

Journalist Robert Jungk was born in Berlin in 1913. He acquired his Ph.D. in modern history at Zurich University. In 1950 he became an American citizen. At present he lives in Salzburg, Austria.
Some of his best-known books are The Big Machine, Tomorrow Is Already Here (1954), and Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (1957).

We will have to have translators. Very often scientists don't understand each other. I see myself as a translator, as a mediator between scientists and politicians, because I have lived in the political community for a long time. And not only do we need translators, we even need in our universities departments where scientists and specialists learn to talk to each other or to the public or to the politicians. We have a fantastic tower of Babel nowadays, where people don't talk the same languages anymore.

 

Sung Tse said already, ‘They don't know themselves and they don't know their enemy.’ That's the problem of the world today. No one speaks the same language.

 

We have to get this communication working. I think it can be done. What I am most interested in is helping to bridge the gap between the scientists and the people, the intellectuals and the people, the simple people.

I feel that there exists a new separation between haves and have-nots. The have-nots are not the people only who are poor in material goods. The have-nots are the ones who never can express their own ideas and their own thoughts, who are condemned to an eternal life of receptivity and passivity. If you deny to a man the possibility to express himself, to elaborate on his own ideas - to ‘invent the future’ (to quote Gabor), not leave the invention of the future to a few planners and intellectuals but give him a chance to take part in the invention of his future, because the future belongs to all of us - then he won't be interested.

 

Is it a matter of schooling, of education?

 

No. I was very much interested in the research on creativity. If you talk to people who researched creativity, there is a very interesting thing they have discovered. A lack of information is very bad. A lack of experience, lack of education, is terrible in most fields. But in creativity lack of education is an asset. The less information, the less education you have, the more naive you are, the more original you can be.

 

A French diplomat returning from Peking has reported that he found in New York too much information and in Peking too little; thus, following your theory, the Chinese would be more creative than Americans.

 

The Chinese did find new ways, because nobody told them things had to be done. That's what we are being told from our early beginning, from a very early image.

 

Programmed -

 

From the beginning of our life, we are told that's how it ought to be, that's how it is. Instead every new human being coming into the world should discover the world and create the world out of his own imagination, out of his own knowledge, out of his own experience.

 

We are being programmed by the environment?

 

Skinner1 wants us to go on to be programmed. I think we should develop our program ourselves. I have started future-creating-workshops. I get together with the uneducated, with young workers, with young peasants, with men from the street, in Germany, in Austria. I did this, for instance, in Vienna with groups of young workers. I asked them, now

I want you to invent the future, your own future. I asked them, what are your different ideas? What do you want? What do you criticize in education? What do you criticize in your working environment? What do you criticize about the environment, the big environment? This is how it works.

These people come up with negative lists, for instance, they tell me what they don't like in their work. I compile a long list, about a hundred different points of criticism. Then I ask them choose two or three things they would like to change immediately, what burns them most. Somebody will say, the repetitive character of work. The fact that he cannot be interested in the work. The fact that he is being told what to do instead of doing it himself.

Then I say, ‘Okay, have you any ideas how to change the repetitive character of work, have you any ideas how to develop the initiative of your work, on the shopfloor?’ Then they turn up with ideas. They come up with the most different ideas. They develop them. They say, for instance, we could set up our own projects, what we want to produce. We could discuss this with the production managers, but we are never asked. They always only tell us. I let them invent during a kind of brainstorming session. I apply the techniques of brainstorming. I'm interested in social invention. These people then come up with ideas and then - this is the second stage of what I am doing in the future workshop. Then comes the most important stage. They come up with new ideas and then I bring in experts or politicians. In Vienna I had a Minister of Public Industry or Minister of Education. The people, who had just ‘invented’ a new form of schooling, a new form of work, they were confronted with the decision-makers. The decision-makers usually do say it cannot be done, it is too difficult or it costs too much, or there are such and such obstacles. I said, ‘All right, now you have a confrontation between dream and reality. You two sit together and develop strategies how your dreams could become true.’ And then the exciting thing happened, I have seen it again and again, that people who are not interested in politics, who couldn't affect any decisions, sit together with the decisionmakers and discuss possibilities to overcome the obstacles to get something new going. Thus, I do two things: First of all, I introduce the people who really represent ninety-nine pecent of the people of the world into the decision process because I am using their imagination. I get them to learn, so they become educated. What they do is their baby.

This was creativity, social creativity. What is your second major interest?

 

My second interest is very closely related to this. I feel that most of our future research lacks imagination. I try to get the artists and the people who are, so to say, specialists in imagination into work of the future. Not only scientists. Scientists follow logical paths, but artists who employ intuitions, visions.

 

Paolo Soleri.2

 

Exactly. Artists have a heightened sensitivity. I try to introduce the artist's way of thinking into future concepts. I feel that the role of the artist in society is not to introduce reality like in socialist realism, but to bring their special qualities of intuition and vision, of seeing quality instead of quantity, into life. In fact, I am starting next year in Salzburg an Institute for the Future of the Arts, where the people will get together. First, we will start a documentation center. Then I will get seminars rolling and in the end I'll do research. I want to apply the artist in society as a work of art. The artist does not have to produce works of art, but to put his special gifts to work for society on the whole.

The second phase is the democratization of future research, of future planning, by introducing more imagination and especially artistic imagination into that and a kind of a counterpoint to the logical, scientific and technological imagination, which was used too far. Man has more dimensions than the scientific and technological ones. There's a new movement now, I mean, people around John Platt, people who talk about new science, the science which is larger than the purely logical rational science, which embodies more of the things you cannot express so clearly, where you have more half thoughts and more dynamics and more flow, this is what actually is coming up.

 

What is your new book about?

 

The provisory title is Man Plus; the subtitle, For a New Direction of Growth. I am trying to explain the following. We are coming to a certain slowing down, maybe to a certain end, even, of our material development, as has been said in Limits to Growth. I feel there are no limits to growth. We are underdeveloped in the direction of human development and social development. I feel that a new field of progress, so to say, is a development of human faculties. I have seven fields

developed in my new book. The one I've told you about is imagination. Imagination is a fantastic sort of creativity which has been buried and which we have to liberate. The second thing is the development of seeing the whole instead of the parts.

 

Like the model of MIT.

 

Yes, that is something going into that direction. The third thing is foresight instead of seeing the consequences of what you are doing. The fourth is that you begin to experiment that changes, not something terrible but something natural, to introduce flow and change and experiment into society instead of being afraid of it. The fifth is cooperation, because what we have - we call now cooperation - is really sheer competition, even if you have units -

 

Solidarity -

 

Yes, I mean really cooperation, group processes. How you can actually see the other person as your Verstärkung, as a strengthening of you, instead of being a competitor. Then the sixth is the entire domain of nonfinality, of play, of game, of doing things not for the benefit, not to get a result -

 

Creation -

 

No. Of game, of play of - not only free time, it is more, it is an attitude of mind. Usually we do something because it is beautiful or do something because we get something. We have a goal. I feel that the whole art of man - because he was always forced by deed, by external need - is always going to an object, to an aim. I think that one of the developments of man is doing things just for the fun of it and not having a bad conscience at the same time. And the seventh thing is what I call - the growing universe. The further you go into the heavens the further the universe recedes from you. The universe is growing all the time up to a certain point. I develop an idea of growing man. Man never will be God, but man is growing, nevertheless, all the time. Man so far has only grown to a very small percentage of his capability. Man is larger than he is thought of so far. I speak of - as I've written in an article for Unesco - ‘mind laboratories.’ These mind laboratories would have a similar pioneering role as the physics, biology and chemical laboratories

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the mind laboratories you would have a cooperation of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, ideologists, pharmacologists. It is a kind of prospective anthropology which is why I'm so interested in Edgar Morin,3 because he tries something into this direction. I feel these mind laboratories will have a similar impact on the development of mankind, as the natural science laboratories in ages of the past.

 

How much sympathy and Begriff [understanding (Ger.)] do you find in the scientific community for mind laboratories?

 

I launched this idea in the social-science magazine of UNESCO. The difficulty is this: A new generation of young scientists is growing up, who are much less discipline-oriented and much more generalist-oriented. You probably know of Notes on a Counterculture by Rossack, which carries an important point. Rossack talks about the myth of objectivity. The fact that science actually tries to dissect everything and does not see the whole -

 

What McLuhan4 calls ‘compartmentalization’ -

 

Exactly. This is why I feel we have a fantastic development now among younger scientists. They will be the ones who will be able to execute mind laboratories -

 

Because they are generalists -

 

They are generalists, and they are not so proud of their own discipline. For instance, one group in Heidelberg is working on complex phenomena, rather than on single phenomena. They look at complexities, and this is the way to look at things. So if you ask how scientists received my ideas, I feel I am in excellent contact with younger scientists, because they understand this. The older ones still think that precision counts, what we call Fliegenbeinen Ausreiss-soziology - when you count the legs of flies instead of seeing the whole. The younger ones don't count the legs of flies anymore. They see the big problems and they see how they are interrelated, how they change, most of all how they are dynamic. The central idea to everything I undertake is this: I've been to physics laboratories, to biology laboratories, to chemical laboratories - in all these laboratories it is no more the single atom, the single molecule,

it is a process, a dynamic process, that is being studied. There are no atoms, there is a burst of energy which you can photograph as atoms. There is a dynamic process going on. The other way of conception is to limit it, to see that really.

Now, I think in social science it's similar. We have had a static conception of political and social reality, and we are developing a dynamic view. Science is based on data. When you read the data, they are all thousands of corpses of reality, particles of reality. When you read a book, the events have moved beyond the book, so what has to be changed is the concept of what is reality, what are data. You have to look, to monitor the flow of things, the dynamic of things, rather than all this running behind history and running behind the events.

 

That's the approach of the Club of Rome.

 

Yes, exactly. We get this dynamic concept into the whole thing. What I am critical of in the approach of MIT is that it still has too few factors, it is still too limited. It is as if man was only a skeleton of man. You don't see the flesh. I see the bones of history in the report of MIT. I see the big lines, but I don't see the flesh. I don't see the breath. I don't see the contour, life. This has very much to do with our rigid, old methods of perception, with our rigid, old methods of seeing things. We want to put them down. Faust says, Goethe says, you write it down and then you can carry it home. Nothing of the kind. You carry home a corpse, something dead, and what is alive goes on. We somehow have to hitch onto that alive thing, that's why I was so interested in McLuhan, because you have in the electronic media, you are, so to say, watching the process while it's happening.

 

Is it not a shadow of what is happening - what you see on TV - and thus fake?

 

No, it's incomplete. It's two-dimensional. It's not three- and not four-dimensional. You know what I mean, it's just an Ahnung [a vague idea, a notion (Ger.)]?

 

Is it not dangerous to live by Ahnung?

 

Yes and no. If you see them as Ahnung only and if you see that the complete picture is a combination of the single plus what you yourself add to it.

That is how you might interpret the mechanics of watching television. But I was talking about the far majority of the TV audience.

 

You are quite right, there are large misconceptions. One of the dangers in the Club of Rome approach is the following: Limits to Growth becomes now - and it was certainly not intended by either Aurelio Peccei5 or by Meadows6 as such - a kind of technocratic ideology. There arrived a VIP, who announced the world is in danger. We have to do something fast. We have to decree what should be done, and people will have to conform. We have to save the world and we have not enough time to discuss it all. What I am afraid of is that the whole idea of the Club of Rome becomes a kind of a technocratic ideology justifying a few powerful people who try to impose their ideas and their picture of development onto living and widerspruchsvoll [full of contradictory ideas (Ger.)], a reality which is full of Widerspruch.

Frankly, I am afraid of Forrester. I have seen Forrester. He is a Stalinist7 type. He's a type of man who is actually very cold, very inhuman, who actually tries to impose his pattern on reality. He was very cool. Most of the things he has said about, let us say, that slums should be continued, instead of building new quarters for people. He insists one should first raise productivity. But this is extremely dangerous.

Therefore, I am so interested to tie in people. If you don't ask people, if you don't take in what the people want to do, if you really impose ideas on them, if you impose planning on them, you really will prepare revolutions and explosions of an unknown, a never-experienced violence. I am really firmly convinced - and I speak from the experience I had with my ‘future workshops’ - that people are much more reasonable, that they are much more inventive than we trust them to be. If we do show the patience, if we do take the time to talk to them. The intellectuals don't have patience. That was my main trouble with Oppenheimer.8 Oppenheimer had a fantastic mind. He was a special kind of man, but he had no humility. He had no patience. He had no possibility to talk to simple people and to understand them. If we enter into the crisis, which has been delineated in the report of the Club of Rome, then we need the ideas of everybody. We have to enlarge our basis of creativity and originality, and we also have to have the people with us instead of imposing ideas on them. This is where I think in a different direction.

For me, the most important sentences in Limits to Growth are the last in the book, where it is said, ‘We have to think of man, what is going to happen to man, how man could change and should change.’ You probably know it by heart, this very last sentence in the report. That's

actually where we should continue our work. We should go from there into this field and that's what I try to do. I try to work on the development of man. That's why my new man is called ‘Man Plus.’ We have not to take man only as an elite of man but really include everybody. And I would say if we could have a project ‘Every Man,’ like we had a Project Apollo, which actually exploits the treasures which are buried in the common man, then we make a fantastic discovery. That's what I'm trying to fight for.

 

To unearth common man: You compare to drilling for oil -

 

It is very hard to go through this whole Pantzer [armor (Ger.)], man's fears and depressions, not ever having been asked to. It's like drilling. You have to drill through a crust, and only if you have the patience to drill through it, then you hit the sources, the living creativity which had been buried from the early ages on.

 

That's what Mao Tse-tung has been doing in China.

 

He is trying to do that, yes -

 

Everybody participates in decisions.

 

The only thing is, then again, doesn't he force people too much to crowd that in a certain language which is again being dogmatic? The terrible thing is that everyone wants to build his own monument. I am afraid that Mao Tse-tung also wants to build his monument, in his language, in his teaching, in his little book. If he would be open enough to throw away the language and say let the people express themselves as they express themselves, if he would be able to do away with all the pictures and all the images. We all are afraid to die, and unless we get new time dimensions - -to look beyond our death and see cooperation with following generations - it is not important what we have done or how we made our mark, but that we are only part of this flow of people going through the ages, then we would be really achieving something. There is this egoism in people, that everything has to happen in a lifetime. That's ridiculous. Important things happen very slowly, and we should think beyond our lifetime. Maybe something we start now will be finished or may be continued only in thirty years from now and in fifty years from now or even finished in two hundred years from now.

But everyone still feels he has to build his monument, within his own lifetime. That's actually what makes him dogmatic, what makes him hard, what makes him limited, and inhuman.


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